Napping: Is it good for you?

Kurt Kleiner talks about his love towards napping and looks for reasons to take his nap. With all those negative perceptions in the modern world on napping, he wants to prove that it may not be bad thing at all.Kurt Kleiner talks about his love towards napping and looks for reasons to take his nap. With all those negative perceptions in the modern world on napping, he wants to prove that it may not be bad thing at all.

He found many studies recently shows napping improve productivity. How useful is it for a 10 minutes nap if you can have a better productivity after that:

But sleep experts say a lot of us really could use that nap. James B. Maas, the Cornell University sleep expert, says most people don’t get enough sleep and that an afternoon nap can help. In fact, Maas coined the term “power nap” to emphasize that a nap can make a person more productive and energetic.

Many studies have shown that napping improves mood and performance.

This year, researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, reported that they took test subjects who had had only five hours of sleep the night before and let them have naps of varying durations.

They found that even a 10-minute nap made the subjects feel less sleepy and more vigorous, and led to improved cognitive performance.

Nevertheless, mainstream sleep researchers are only grudging boosters of the nap. They tend to see it as second-best, necessary only for people who haven’t gotten enough sleep the night before.

“A nap can rejuvenate you to get through the rest of the day,” Maas says. “But we’d much rather have people with good nocturnal sleep, so they would not need to take a nap.”